Privacy and security in environmental monitoring systems : issues and solutions

Today there is an increasing interest in environmental monitoring for a variety of specific applications, with great impact especially on natural resource management and preservation, economy, and people's life and health. Typical uses encompass, for example, Earth observation, meteorology, natural resource monitoring, agricultural and forest monitoring, pollution control, natural disaster observation and prediction, and critical infrastructure monitoring. While on one hand these systems play an important role in our society, on the other hand their adoption can raise a number of security and privacy concerns, which can present an obstacle for developing future environmental applications. In this chapter, we identify the main security and privacy issues characterizing the environmental data as well as the environmental monitoring infrastructures. We then provide an overview of possible countermeasures for diminishing the effects of these security and privacy issues.